The present invention relates to an adaptive motion search range determining apparatus and method, and more particularly, to an adaptive motion search range determining apparatus and method for encoding an image with high-resolution of Ultra High Definition (UHD) class, which enable each macroblock to have an adaptive search range by variably adjusting a motion vector search range of a current macroblock with reference to motion vectors of neighboring macroblocks of the current macroblock.
High-speed of motion modules requiring a lot of computation quantities and hardware is especially essential to encode high-definition images in real-time. In the case of low-resolution images, enough efficiency could be obtained even though search ranges are narrow. In the case of high-resolution images such as UHD images, however, the size of a search range should increase in proportion to the increase in the size of an image. However, since the complexity of an image encoder also increases as the size of search range increases, an excessive large search range acts on the image encoder as a burden.
Therefore, in order to reduce the burden of image encodes, even though images have high-resolution, it is important to properly determine the size of a search range.
The above-described technology means the background in the art to which the present invention pertains, but does not mean the prior art.
When encoding images after properly determining the size of a search range as above, motion search has been typically performed according to a search range which is fixed in size, or arbitrarily adjusted in size according to image resolution.
However, when images have not a lot of motions, there is a limitation in that the aforesaid method increases computation quantity because motion search is still performed in an unnecessary search range, thus making it difficult to realize real-time encoding.